A couple days ago, I opened the fridge. Cool story right? WAIT, it gets even BETTER.

I was looking for food. I can’t tell you how often I open the fridge, hoping to find food in there that I know is not there and has no chance of being there. Food like pumpkin pie, or a roast chicken, or a roast chicken stuffed with pie. I open the cupboards several times a day for the same reason. I’ll open the cupboards and exclaim, ‘SALTY SNACKS?!’ hoping beyond hope that a Reverse Burglar has snuck into my kitchen for the sole purpose of leaving behind pretty much any food that has been converted into oily salty crunchy crispy form.

In the fridge was some fancy pants mozzarella. It was squeezed out of a buffalo by artisan buffalo squeezers. Mozzarella like this comes in a water bath inside a special plastic container specially designed to cause mozzarella envy in your social rivals. I reached for the FPM and found that the water was gone, thanks to someone having tipped over the envy packaging on its side. Although I’m no fridge scientist, I had an instinctive feeling that leaving mozzarella water in the fridge would probably give us all mad buffalo disease. But there was no water. I said, ‘Well THIS warrants no further investigation or thought!’ and went about my business. My MAN business.

When I came home tonight, our kitchen smelled vaguely shitty. But not everywhere. If you could divide the kitchen into 10 smell segments, 2 of them smelled vaguely like a sneaky someone had spirited away a small shit. The other 8 segments smelled like they always do – wholemeal bread and child-borne exhaustion.

Through a lot of undignified sniffing around, it was determined that the fridge was the culprit. Behind the fridge. Sara thought it might be a dead mouse. Sara decided it would be a good idea to tell me this great story about a friend of hers who found a dead mouse WELDED to the back of their fridge. So with 500% more trepidation than I had before that fine yarn, I pulled the fridge out. And what do you know – a mouse AND a small shit were welded to the fridge!!

No.

No, what I found was that the small drainage hole that I’d previously spotted inside the fridge actually went somewhere. Where it went was a plastic collection tray. It would appear that 100% of the mozzarella water disappeared down the drainage hole and came to rest in this tray. The tray, by design, sits on top of the hot fridge compressor. Ordinarily, plain water drains down there and the heat evaporates it away. However, through the terrifying magic of chemistry, the mozzarella water was, now, at this moment, decidedly Something Else. The plastic tray was nearly overflowing with a pungent semisolid liquid combo that was about 37 shades of brown. The fridge manufacturer apparently did not envision that this plastic tray would become the accidental staging ground for a bioweapons precursor, and so did not design a way to remove said tray. Therefore the only way to clean it up was to soak a tree or two’s worth of paper towels into the tray until the nearly-sentient gloop was gone. The series of faces and sounds I made may prevent me from sleeping until the solstice.

Well. There’s no good way to close a post like this.

…got milk?